Daniel Martino didn’t set out to build an empire of pie shops. He just wanted somewhere to get coffee without leaving the neighborhood.
When he bought his home in Port Richmond in 2013, the closest coffee shop was an hour round trip, he said. “Selfishly, I thought, I can put a little coffee shop here.”
The takeout window at Little Susie’s flagship location at 2532 E. Lehigh Ave.Jessica Griffin / Staff Photographer
And what goes better with a cup of coffee than pie? He had a recipe he’d been baking for family get-togethers.
Seven years after Martino opened Little Susie’s Coffee & Pie in the building next door to his house, his modest idea has grown into four Philadelphia locations, with a fifth expected to open Friday at the former Pop’s Bun Shop in Bella Vista, a franchise headed to Milwaukee, and plans for additional shops in Fairmount and Northern Liberties. All his stores run from takeout windows, requiring little more than coffee stations and electric ovens.
Today, the company employs 28 people and turns out about 1,200 pies a day from a bakery occupying two cramped rooms in the corner rowhouse on Lehigh Avenue.
Owner Daniel Martino with trays of pies at Little Susie’s.Jessica Griffin / Staff Photographer
Martino, 46, who grew up in Northeast Philadelphia, has spent much of his working life around food. As a teenager, he worked at a swim club snack bar before taking a kitchen job at what is now Jefferson Torresdale Hospital.
After studying film at Temple University, he joined Public House Investments, which ran City Tap House, as a DJ before becoming the hospitality company’s creative director, designing menus, logos, ads, and marketing material.
When the property next door to his house became available, Martino said he used a home-equity line of credit to buy it before securing a Small Business Administration loan to renovate it.
The takeout window at Little Susie’s. Hand-lettered signs advertise the specials.Jessica Griffin / Staff Photographer
By the time Little Susie’s opened in December 2019, he said, “I had maxed out every credit card I had. I even had to go to the bank, hat in hand, and sign a signature loan for the last $10,000 just to get it open.”
His shop offered a simple menu, little more than coffees and lattes and four kinds of pies. There was a counter for seating. The first day brought in about $180, and “it was the greatest day of my life,” Martino said.
Then the pandemic arrived. When COVID-19 restrictions shut down indoor dining, Little Susie’s shifted to window service. Customers called in orders, paid over the phone, and picked up coffee and pies outside. Even after restrictions were lifted, the shop never reopened indoors.
It wasn’t what Martino had imagined. His idea was ”Cheers with coffee — the neighbors and the mailman talking about the weather,” he said.
Instead, customers embraced the walk-up model and the seating at a picnic table beneath a maple tree. The pies especially quickly caught on. The signature is the crust. Rather than trimming away the excess dough, workers twist it around each pie by hand, creating what Martino calls “a fluffiness that the fork doesn’t provide — that flaky tenderness you want in a pie crust. The twist is its own special treat in and of itself.”
Owner Daniel Martino (rear, right) with staff and pies at Little Susie’s, set up in a rowhouse.Jessica Griffin / Staff Photographer
The pies, which are baked and not fried, are made with a simple crust of flour, butter, sugar, and salt. It’s a 48-hour process. Dough is mixed at the company’s Kensington location, where a 20-quart mixer runs nearly all day. The dough rests for 24 hours before it is brought to Port Richmond, where it is sheeted, filled, twisted, frozen, and delivered to the other stores to be baked to order.
Little Susie’s first menu included only blueberry, pork roll, apple, and mushroom Swiss fillings. Today, it offers about a dozen varieties, with eight available year-round and others rotating seasonally. “You can practically throw anything in this pie crust,” Martino said. “I haven’t been disappointed yet.”
Pies at Little Susie’s.Jessica Griffin / Staff Photographer
Pork roll remains the top seller, followed by apple, and a sausage, egg, and cheese breakfast pie encrusted with everything bagel seasoning. Seasonal flavors have included ham and Brie, chocolate-covered strawberry, and Cajun crab and corn. None are gluten-free because of the shop’s limitations, he said.
Not every idea works. “We tried to make a cannoli pie, but the cream just melted right out,” he said.
Each shop sells 200 to 300 pies a day. The production kitchen now employs 11 bakers, who track production on a whiteboard nicknamed “the Pieble.” Each variety get its own knife mark on top; an inverted V, for example, denotes mushroom Swiss.
The “Pieble” at Little Susie’s, the flagship pie takeout place located at 2532 E. Lehigh Ave., in Philadelphia, June 24, 2026.Jessica Griffin / Staff Photographer
Lena Hurchick, who has worked at Little Susie’s for three years, said she enjoys “the competition of filling all the shops” and watching customers eat pies she helped make.
“Susie” was the name of the dog that belonged to the former owner of the building. “When we had the community meeting here, I said, ‘I’m thinking Little Susie’s,’ and people started crying,” he said.
Lena Hurchick crimps mushroom pies at Little Susie’s.Jessica Griffin / Staff Photographer
Expansion has brought complications. A planned Fairmount location was nearly ready to open before the city determined that the property required zoning approval for food sales. “The city does not make it easy,” he said, adding that it will take months to get onto the zoning board’s calendar.
Even so, he expects the company to keep growing. He has a handshake deal for a spot in Northern Liberties. Milwaukee is planned as the first franchise — operated by a friend — while Martino has begun thinking about a larger bakery in Philadelphia.
“We’re basically bursting at the seams,” he said. “We’re probably going to need a 10,000-square-foot facility.”
Owner Daniel Martino at Little Susie’s.Jessica Griffin / Staff Photographer
He wants that growth to remain slow enough that the pies are still made fresh every day. “I don’t want to get too far away from making them every day, because then it just becomes some frozen-food empire,” he said.
Little Susie’s Coffee & Pies’ locations are at 2532 E. Lehigh Ave. in Port Richmond, Second and Chestnut Streets in Old City, 1772 N. Front St. in Kensington, and 1754 S. Chadwick St. in Point Breeze. A fifth, at 800 S. Ninth St. in Bella Vista, is due to open Friday. Hours are 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily.
Philadelphia police found a “significant amount” of blood inside the decrepit Olney house linked to the investigation of at least two missing women, multiple law enforcement sources said.
The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said forensic testing has not yet determined whose blood it is or whether it’s even human — a process that could take several weeks to complete. But, the sources said, police are prepared to excavate the front and backyards of the West Chew Avenue home in the coming weeks in search of potential human remains.
Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Vanore declined to confirm or comment on the discovery Monday afternoon, citing the ongoing investigation. Vanore said Friday that police had not recovered any human remains from the home and were awaiting testing of the tubs of chemicals and other materials found in the basement.
Forensic investigators search the backyard of 417 W. Chew Ave. on June 27.Aidan T. Gallo / Staff Photographer
The finding marks the latest development in an unusual saga that began after the arrest of Eugene Albert Horsch, 44, the owner of the Olney home now being searched by law enforcement for a second week in connection with the disappearance of at least two women who have been missing for years.
Horsch was arrested June 19 after U.S. Park Police saw him parked in his black BMW near Sixth and Market Streets, acting suspiciously. When a ranger approached the car, police said, he heard a woman in the back seat say, “You’re going to hurt me” and saw drug paraphernalia.
Police searched the car and reported recovering two guns with obliterated serial numbers, as well as cocaine, fentanyl, and marijuana, a cattle prod, switchblade knives, handcuffs, and a fake U.S. Drug Enforcement badge featuring Horsch’s photo.
The woman with Horsch falsely identified herself to the officers as Blair Tonzelli, a 38-year-old woman who had been reported missing in Kensington in 2023, police said.
The woman, 39, later told investigators that she gave Tonzelli’s name because she had open warrants for her arrest in ongoing drug cases and that Horsch had made her fake identification cards in that name and said she could use it if she was ever stopped and questioned by police, sources said.
Eugene Albert Horsch, 44, was arrested June 19 for illegal gun possession and drug crimes. Courtesy of Philadelphia police
The woman said she did not know Tonzelli or even that she was missing — but the way Horsch spoke about her and other women made her feel like something bad had happened to her, the sources said.
Philadelphia homicide detectives then began reviewing that missing woman’s case, and, alongside federal law enforcement, searched Horsch’s home at 417 W. Chew Ave. last week.
That search produced a trove of bizarre discoveries: a basement with drums filled with chemicals, bottles of unknown substances, Tonzelli’s bank card, the death certificate of another woman, and what appeared to be urns holding at least one of Horsch’s relatives’ cremated remains.
Investigators also found another handgun, materials used to grow marijuana, and a 55-gallon drum with connections to waterlines leading into a hole in the ground.
Federal investigators also discovered a multipage, unsigned, handwritten letter that appeared to describe hurting people and referenced the serial killer Ted Bundy, according to the affidavit of probable cause to search the home that was obtained by The Inquirer.
Eugene Horsch lived at 417 W. Chew Ave. with his father until he died last year. Jessica Griffin / Staff Photographer
Law enforcement sources said police were working to determine whether the writings were part of a novel or screenplay. Horsch’s late father, Raymond “R.C.” Horsch was a known drug manufacturer and erotic filmmaker who had published several works of fiction with violent, masochistic themes, including one described as an “autobiographical memoir of a caring, empathetic serial killer.”
The probe into the younger Horsch took another twist when investigators learned that Raymond Horsch’s ex-wife Amy McHale was last seen at the Olney property in 2016 and has not since be located. A lawyer for Eugene Horsch and his father said the two men had nothing to do with McHale’s disappearance and said she struggled with substance abuse and mental illness.
Horsch has been charged with illegal gun possession and drug crimes by Philadelphia authorities.
He is also facing a federal gun possession charge, court records show. The U.S. Attorney’s Office filed a complaint against Horsch on Friday, charging him with possession of a firearm by a felon and centering their allegations on the guns that park rangers found in his car during an encounter in Center City earlier this month.
Horsch has not yet been arraigned in that matter, and he remained in a city jail, held on $500,000 bail as of Monday afternoon. But the case could give federal prosecutors an opportunity to argue to a judge that he remain in federal custody until trial.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
Staff writers Jesse Bunch, Max Marin, Barbara Laker, and Chris Palmer contributed to this article.
Amy McHale and Raymond “R.C.” Horsch met on the streets when she was battling pneumonia and needed medical care.
She had long struggled with mental health issues and drug and alcohol addiction. She saw Horsch, an erotic photographer and filmmaker 30 years her senior, as her rock, said her mother, Gloria McHale.
“He was like her savior.”
They held their wedding reception beside a greenhouse in the sprawling, serene backyard of his Chalfont home in September 2004. The marriage lasted only a few years, but Amy McHale kept going back to Horsch after he moved to a house on West Chew Avenue in the Olney section of Philadelphia with his son, Eugene Albert Horsch.
She was staying there on June 14, 2016, when she left a voicemail message for her daughter, Amanda Stofer, saying all was OK. At the time, Amy McHale was a 44-year-old mom and grandmother of three.
She has been missing ever since.
“She would never leave her daughter and grandchildren,” Gloria McHale, 79, said by phone after news broke this week that authorities had been combing through that house for days. “She loved them, adored them.”
For more than a week, Philadelphia police and federal authorities have been searching the crumbling Horsch twin home to determine if there is any connection to the disappearance of Amy McHale and one other woman.
R.C. Horsch was a controversial figure who had been convicted of forgery and drug manufacturing when he died in May 2025 of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease at age 82. Police have not named him as a person of interest in a missing-person investigation.
His son, Eugene Albert Horsch, is being held on $500,000 bail at Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility on charges of illegal gun possession and drug crimes. He had a criminal history that included at least 10 other arrests for drug possession, dealing, assault, and drunken driving when he was arrested earlier this month near Independence Hall after his actions drew the attention of U.S. Park Police.
“This is much ado about nothing,” said Eugene Horsch’s attorney, Jerome Brown, of his client’s connection to any missing-person investigation. “They’re barking up the wrong tree.”
When the news broke, McHale’s mother and daughter thought they might finally discover what happened.
“But I don’t feel much closure, and today is an emotional low,” McHale’s daughter, Amanda Stofer, said Saturday. “I was hoping for some answers about my mother from the home, but I’m doubtful that will happen.
“It just feels heavy and sad.”
The case came to light under bizarre circumstances. U.S. Park Police stopped Horsch, 44, near Sixth and Market streets on June 19. In his black BMW, officers recovered two firearms with obliterated serial numbers and a phony drug enforcement badge with Horsch’s photograph under the name “Eugene Frederick Steiner.” He also had large amounts of cocaine, fentanyl, and marijuana, according to an affidavit of probable cause for his arrest.
A woman with Horsch gave officers a false name, one that belonged to a 38-year-old woman who had been reported missing in Kensington in February 2023. Horsch’s passenger told investigators that he had made her fake ID cards with that name before and advised that if she was ever stopped by police, she could use them.
Law enforcement wearing FBI clothing at the scene of an ongoing investigation in the 400 block of West Chew Avenue, searching a home in Olney.Jessica Griffin / Staff Photographer
In Horsch’s dilapidated home, investigators found another handgun, hidden compartments, a 55-gallon drum with connections to water lines leading to a hole in the ground, and chemicals and bottles of liquid that forensics investigators are working to identify. There were also what appeared to be urns holding remains, one set of which was apparently his father’s. The basement resembled some sort of chemical lab.
Federal investigators also found a unsigned and handwritten letter that referenced hurting unspecified people and the serial killer Ted Bundy, according to an affidavit of probable cause obtained by The Inquirer.
Investigators are working to verify the authenticity of the letter, and whether it was meant to serve as a portion of a novel or screenplay.
Under a gloomy sky Saturday, about 15 FBI agents, some wearing hazmat suits, streamed in and out of the boarded-up twin home. “They’ve begun processing the scene,” Philadelphia Deputy Police Commissioner Frank Vanore said. Forensic experts were determining what evidence had to be sent away for scientific analysis, he said. “It’s going to take some time.”
Art and weed
R.C. Horsch, who was born in East Stroudsburg, Monroe County, in 1943, is described in an author’s biography as “an artist, filmmaker, composer, writer, porn performer, drug smuggler, sometime political activist, art forger, counterfeiter, pot grower, air show pilot, army deserter, fugitive, sociopath, ex-convict and all-out villain.”
Throughout his life, R.C. Horsch worked on avant-garde artwork and erotica, often focused on scantily clad women in sadomasochistic settings, including a book described as an “autobiographical memoir of a caring, empathetic serial killer.” He directed his first film, The Erotic Memoirs of a Male Chauvinist Pig, in 1973.
A 1968 news report identified Horsch, then in his mid-20s, as the operator of a theater on the 2000 block of Sansom Street known as “Underground Cinema 16” — later the Roxy — which screened avant-garde films, including his own, but was shut down for operating without a license.
Horsch was married at least three times. He married Anna Ferkuniak, a native of Nant-y-moel, Wales, who was Eugene Horsch’s mother. She died in 1989 at age 39 after a lengthy illness, according to her obituary.
R.C. Horsch also had an extensive criminal history.
He pleaded guilty to passing bad checks in North Carolina in 1973, and the following year the Secret Service charged him and another man in Doylestown with passing nearly $180,000 in fake 10-dollar bills and possessing phony driver’s licenses.
In 1977, federal authorities raided what was described as his home laboratory, seizing equipment they alleged was meant to make methamphetamine. But Horsch left for New Zealand, later returning to California, according to court records, and operating under the alias “Richard Harris.”
Eugene Horsch was born in 1981, while his father was still a fugitive.
Authorities captured R.C. Horsch in Florida in 1985. A psychologist hired by his defense attorney claimed Horsch had a 140 IQ, according to court records, but had “deep rooted emotional problems.”
He was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, plus probation. He later settled in Chalfont but acquired the Chew Avenue house after his aunt died in 2004. In 2007, he used power of attorney to legally transfer ownership to his son for $1.
In 2009, R.C. Horsch was indicted in Chalfont for growing “455 marijuana plants.” Investigators also confiscated two shotguns. The feds seized his suburban home and he was sentenced to 54 months in prison.
Federal inmate records show he was released from prison in 2013, and later moved into the Chew Avenue property, where he would reside until his death. He authored several erotic novels in the 2010s, often focused on women battling substance abuse or mental health issues.
Krista Marie Killen is credited as appearing in multiple erotic films that he directed, including one released as recently as 2021, and at times listed the Chew Avenue house as her residence.
In 2025, a motorist sued R.C. Horsch, Killen, and an unidentified man, claiming the trio crashed their Chrysler 300 into her SUV near Adams Avenue and Montour Street in 2023. Court papers list Killen’s occupation as “caregiver” and the “adult in charge of residence.”
She died the next month, according to an obituary, three months after Horsch.
In searching the home recently, investigators found a death certificate for Killen. According to the affidavit of probable cause, the cause of death was drug intoxication.
‘People don’t vanish’
R.C. Horsch and Amy McHale had become a couple in the 1990s.
“I was a young kid when they started dating, and I want to say he had been around for at least 10 years by the time they got married,” Stofer recalled.
They divorced after a few years and McHale moved in with her mother on South Hutchinson Street in Philadelphia. She went to Peirce College, became a paralegal, and was trying to get her life back on track, said Gloria McHale, 79.
But she could not kick her drug and alcohol addiction, she said. She would periodically return to Horsch’s home on Chew Avenue.
“They stayed friendly with each other,” Stofer said. “I’m sure it had something to do with the drugs and alcohol. I think he enabled her with things that weren’t really permitted in my grandmother’s house.”
On June 13, 2016, she went to Horsch’s. She called her mom that night to tell her she was on her way home. “She was obviously very drunk and I told her to stay where she was, because to get home she would have to take the subway, and she was in no shape to take the subway.”
The next day, she called Stofer and left a message. “She told me she was at Ray’s house and she was OK.”
That’s the last they heard from her.
Amy McHale would sometimes be gone for a couple of days, but never for much longer, they said. Stofer had three children, and her mother doted on them. Stofer was planning her September wedding.
“My mom had her struggles with addiction,” said Stofer, 38. “But my mom would not want to disappear in my life. She would never do that. She always came back around. She never missed big things like my kid’s kindergarten graduation.”
Gloria McHale searched all over for her daughter. “I put signs up all over Kensington,” she said.
Detectives interviewed Horsch. He told police and the McHale family that she was drinking vodka and he went to bed. “He said when he woke up, she was gone,” McHale said.
And Horsch stopped reaching out to her family.
“When she would disappear before, Raymond would always keep calling me. ‘Did you hear from her?’ And after this I never heard from him.”
McHale is hoping someone will come forward now with new information.
“Somebody has to know something,” she said.
“People don’t vanish into thin air.”
Amy McHale.Courtesy of the family of Amy McHale
Staff writers Brett Sholtis, Michelle Myers, and Isabel Maney contributed to this article.
Amid rising inflation and business costs, many Philadelphia corner stores, bars, laundromats, and smoke shops have turned to skill games, the slot machine look-alikes, to help keep their slim margins afloat.
The machines, which shop owners say also encourage their customers to linger in stores and make additional purchases, are particularly profitable because theyare not taxed or regulated like slot machines — and they have been operating without state oversight in a legal gray area for more than a decade. But a recent state Supreme Court ruling may force that tochange.
Last week, Pennsylvania’s highest court handed down a decision deeming skill games the same as slot machines. That means the skill game terminals proliferating around the state will soon be illegal if not operated and taxed at 52%, and housed in a highly regulated casino or truck stop with a license to carry slot machines. Those terms will take effect in less than four months unless the state legislature intervenes.
Owners and clerks at several corner stores throughout Philadelphia that offer the games say they do not contribute a lot of revenue to their establishments directly, but they foster more of a lounge atmosphere in the shops that leads patrons tostay longer and purchase more snacks, drinks, lottery tickets, and other goods. Many of the business owners said they are willing to stomach a tax on skill games, but additional regulations would make them rethink keeping the machines.
José Pérez, who runs a corner store on Opal Street in South Philadelphia, said his store runs on incremental profits. And, he said, when people play the skill game machines and start feeling lucky, they often are inclined to make other purchases there.
“This business is about getting a little bit of money from every product, and the machines are a tiny source of income that adds up to that,” he said in Spanish between transactions at the store’s register. “While people play, they buy other stuff in the store. And if they win, they buy lottery tickets. Because when someone has one vice, they probably have two.”
Tax proposals from Harrisburg
Lawmakers in Harrisburg have for years failed to reach an agreement on how to tax and regulate the so-called skill games
The issue has proved to be tricky in Pennsylvania’s split legislature, where Democrats narrowly control the House and Republicans control the Senate. The skill games industry leader, Georgia-based Pace-O-Matic, long maintained a friendly relationship with the Senate GOP, and the Republican lawmakers appeared willing to support policies that benefited them. But last year, the goodwill began to sour after the company backed political campaigns against incumbent Republican state lawmakers who did not support its requested low tax rate on the machines.
State Rep. Danilo Burgos (D., Philadelphia) and State Sen. Anthony H. Williams (D., Philadelphia) have introduced a bipartisan bill in their chambers to impose a $500-per-month fee on each skill game machine operated in Pennsylvania, with a 50,000-machine cap across the state. There are currently an estimated 70,000 skill game machines in Pennsylvania, according to the state attorney general’s office.
Skill games can be seen through the door of a mini mart on Kensington Avenue in the Kensington section of Philadelphia on Wednesday, July 30, 2025.Elizabeth Robertson / Staff Photographer
The proposed legislation would split revenues among transit and infrastructure, local governments, and state police for enforcing the cap and fee. The bills also prohibit small businesses whose “primary source of net revenue” is from skill games, in an effort to prevent mini casinos in stop-and-go corner stores around the city. Burgos estimates the regulations would bring in $300 million in new revenue to the state in their first year.
The bill includes additional protections for Philadelphia, where City Council voted in 2024 to ban the machines. The ban never went into effect, after a lawsuit was filed seeking to block it. In the legislation before the General Assembly, Philadelphia has specific carve-outs that would allow city officials to block stop-and-go businesses or “chronic nuisance” businesses from getting a license to carry the games.
Surrounded by hundreds of skill games supporters at a news conference Wednesday on the Capitol steps in Harrisburg, Williams said rank-and-file lawmakers would hold up passing the state budget, due June 30, if there is not a deal to protect small businesses from losing their skill games altogether.
“In this time when everybody talks about affordability, I can’t afford a 52% tax,” Williams said.
The fee-per-machine option offered in the Democratic-sponsored bills is backed by Pace-O-Matic, which has spent millions of dollars on political campaigns and lobbying in the state, in addition to millions more spent by other parts of Pennsylvania’s booming gambling industry.
Meanwhile, a separate proposal backed by the Senate GOP and penned last year would set the tax at 35% on gross terminal revenue, in addition to annual license fees. A small portion of those fees would go toward the state’s resources for problem gambling.
Gov. Josh Shapiro, a first-term Democrat, has proposed taxing the machines at the same rate as slot machines — a hefty 52% levy on each machine’s net revenue — in his last two budget proposals. As the machines have continued to proliferate around the state, Shapiro’s office estimated the newly regulated industry could bring in nearly $800 million in revenue in its first year.
Uncertain future with uncertain revenue
Philly store owners were divided on whether it would be worth keeping the machines if they needed to pay a lofty tax on either housing the devices or the profits they made on them.
Andrew Karki, who operates a laundromat near Pérez‘s store in South Philadelphia, said the machines occupy the customers while they wait for their laundry to finish and, as at Pérez‘s store, lead to purchases of candy and soda from the small bodega he runs inside the laundromat.
He estimated the machines make up 15% to 20% of his monthly revenue, and he said he would likely be willing to take on a tax on the games, even a rather large one, to keep them around.
“It’s hard, but we got to pay it. We got to pay it,” Karki said.
For others, like Diego Reyes, who runs a secondhand shop on Kensington Avenue with about a dozen skill machines inside, taxing the small businesses for the machines does not seem fair. The terminals are often owned by small amusement companies, and are largely operated by Pace-O-Matic. The business owners get a cut from the machine’s revenue for allowing the terminal in their building.
“They should tax the owner,” Reyes said in Spanish, wearing a Phillies cap and T-shirt with a size-medium sticker still stuck on the back, as three people played the machines.
Pérez agreed that any tax should be on skill games companies and not on the businesses that carry them.
It is frustrating to think another tax may be coming down the line,he said,when small-business owners already pay so many of them and see little return on the investment in the community.
“Look outside, that pothole has been there for six months. We have no safety,” Pérez said. “What do you want me to pay more taxes for if you are not doing anything to better the conditions with it?”
Staff writer Isabel Maney contributed to this article.
An overwhelming majority of Philadelphians feel safe in their neighborhoods and more than 40% believe that the city has become cleaner under the leadership of Mayor Cherelle L. Parker, according to a new poll, suggesting that city residents see significant progress on the mayor’s key campaign promises.
However, there is not a broad citywide consensus on Parker’s tenure as she heads into an expected reelection campaign next year, and there were also red flags for her and the city, including alarmingly bad evaluations of the public school system.
That is according to a recent Suffolk University/Philadelphia Inquirer poll that surveyed 500 Philadelphians across the city on issues including crime, quality of life, city services, and education. More than half of those surveyed said they would rate Philly as a “good” or “excellent” place to live.
About 83% of residents reported feeling safe in the city just five years after record-high rates of gun violence in Philadelphia, with respondents in neighborhoods most affected by violent crime most likely to say they feel that crime has decreased since Parker took office in 2024.
And the city’s public school system emerged as a primary concern, with 45% saying they would rate Philadelphia’s schools as of “poor” quality, while more than half of the poll’s respondents said that schools play an important role in whether they stay in the city or move out.
The survey was conducted last week, after the financially struggling Philadelphia School District and its controversial school closure plan dominated local headlines for more than a month.
David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center in Boston, said the poll provides Philadelphia policymakers with a blueprint for how to keep people in the city: continue progress on crime and improve the public schools.
“If that happens,” he said, “then Philadelphia is poised to be a renaissance city.”
Mayor Cherelle L. Parker attending the Juneteenth Block Party at the African American Museum in Philadelphia on June 19.Tyger Williams / Staff Photographer
Parker said in a statement that her administration “values both qualitative and quantitative information.”
“The real-life, lived experiences of people in this city are what matters most,” she said. “Polling is not my North Star in how I govern. My solutions always come from the ground up, from what people can see, touch, and feel.”
For Parker’s political fortunes, the poll represents mixed results. It showed that the substantial base of support that lifted the mayor to office in 2023 is holding up, with Black residents and older Philadelphians most likely to say they have a favorable view of her and see progress on her campaign promises.
But Parker has not consolidated broad citywide enthusiasm, with 44% of respondents saying that they have a favorable view of the mayor and 35% saying they have an unfavorable one. That is positive territory for Parker more than halfway through her first term, but not overwhelmingly so.
Her biggest vulnerability is with young people — respondents under age 45 were more likely to say that they had an unfavorable view of the mayor than a favorable one. White residents were also more sour on Parker.
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Paleologos said that the poll shows there are “pockets of strength” that make Parker, a centrist Democrat, electorally strong, but that he would not consider her support broad-based.
Those results come as the city’s most prominent progressive political groups are weighing whether to mount a challenge against Parker next year. As the incumbent, Parker would be the hands-down favorite in any contest, as no Philadelphia mayor has lost a campaign for reelection in modern history.
Aren Platt, the executive director of People for Parker, the mayor’s political arm, said in a statement that Parker’s support “has always been under-counted, especially in public polling.” He cited polling conducted during the 2023 mayor’s race that showed her tied with or trailing her top opponents in the Democratic primary, in which Parker prevailed by a commanding 10 percentage points.
Platt also said the Suffolk University/Inquirer poll is not necessarily predictive of how the mayor could perform in a theoretical reelection race. The poll was of Philadelphia residents, not likely primary voters.
“This poll may reflect the demographics of Philadelphia, but elections are decided by the people who show up to vote on election day,” he said. “In Philadelphia, those are two very different universes.”
The poll also showed relatively positive marks for one of Parker’s potential successors: City Council President Kenyatta Johnson. He has said that he supports Parker for reelection, but Philadelphia mayors are limited to two terms and Johnson is widely seen as a potential future contender for the city’s top office.
Overall, 48% of respondents said they had a favorable view of Johnson and only 12% had an unfavorable one. Johnson is also far less publicly known than Parker, with 40% of those surveyed saying they had either never heard of him or were undecided on their view of him.
Negative reviews of the Philadelphia School District
About one in five respondents said that schools and education are the most important issue in the city, making it second only to crime. Paleologos said that is somewhat unique to Philadelphia — in other major cities where he has polled public opinion, he said, respondents often rank jobs and the economy as greater concerns.
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Nearly 75% of respondents said they would rate the quality of Philadelphia’s public schools as “fair” or “poor.” Younger residents were far more likely than older ones to rate the schools as “poor,” and more than half of all respondents said the public schools are an important factor in determining whether they and their family stay in the city or move away.
“That’s a big number,” Paleologos said. “That research alone gives the policymakers a bird’s-eye view of what they need to do to keep people here in Philadelphia.”
The survey also shows that residents see issues across the school system. When asked what should be the highest priority in improving the schools, there was little consensus among respondents: About a third said teacher pay, while a quarter said school safety, and another quarter said building repairs.
Just 4.4% said the highest priority should be instituting year-round school, an initiative that Parker campaigned on and that the district is piloting.
Superintendent Tony B. Watlington Sr., School Board President Reginald L. Streater, and Mayor Cherelle L. Parker stand together during an announcement at the School District of Philadelphia Headquarters on June 10.Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer
In a statement provided to The Inquirer after the initial publication of this story, Monique Braxton, a spokesperson for the School District of Philadelphia, said district leaders share “the public’s sense of urgency to significantly improve public schools in the City of Philadelphia.”
She said the district is making progress toward the superintendent’s goal of making the district the “fastest improving large urban district in the nation.”
Braxton added that the district’s own survey suggests most parents are satisfied. The district’s 2024-25 survey, Braxton said, found that 90.3% of more than 26,000 parents whose students attend district schools said they were pleased with the quality of education their child received.
The quality of Philadelphia’s public schools has been a perennial concern, and city leaders have long pointed to the chronic underfunding of the Philadelphia School District. In 2023, the state Commonwealth Court ruled that Pennsylvania had for years unconstitutionally deprived students in low-wealth districts of an adequate education, and state lawmakers are now funding schools under a new formula.
District leaders have undertaken significant efforts in recent years to improve academic performance. There have been some positive results, including improvement on test scores and a recent report that said Philadelphia School District students’ learning post-pandemic was tops in the nation among large urban districts.
The district also earlier this year adopted a sweeping, $3.3 billion effort to renovate and modernize 169 schools. That multiyear plan was hotly debated, as it included the closure of 17 schools.
Councilmember Nina Ahmad shows off her T-shirt during a rally outside of the School District of the Philadelphia School District headquarters building on May 28. Council members rallied to oppose the school closure plan.Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer
Parker said the Commonwealth Court “got it right” in declaring that low-wealth districts like Philadelphia’s are chronically underfunded.
“If we had all the resources we need, we’d see even more enhanced improvements in our schools,” Parker said. “I’ll never stop fighting for our children and their right to a high-quality education.”
Crime is the top concern, but most residents feel safe
Despite rates of violent crime in the city plummeting to record lows under Parker, public safety remains the top concern for three in 10 Philadelphia residents, suggesting that people who live in the city are still anxious about crime.
When asked about whether they believe crime in their neighborhood has increased or decreased over the last two years, a third of respondents said they believe it has increased, about 32% said it has decreased, and 28% said they believe it has stayed the same.
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A closer look at the results shows that a plurality of respondents in the neighborhoods most affected by violent crime, including North and West Philadelphia, believe that crime has decreased.
The respondents most likely to say that they believe crime in their area has increased live in Northeast Philly. But public data maintained by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office show overall crime has decreased there, too. There are five Northeast Philadelphia police districts, and the total number of crime incidents reported to police declined in all of them between 2023, the year before Parker took office, and last year.
Despite the mixed poll results, a vast majority of Philadelphians — nearly 83% — said that they feel safe in their own neighborhood.
That is good news for Parker, who ran for office as a tough-on-crime Democrat amid a historic wave of gun violence and who vowed often to “bring order back to our city.”
Philadelphia police officers stand along the 2800 block of Kensington Ave. after a police involved shooting on May 23. Police shot a robbery suspect.Yong Kim / Staff Photographer
Parker said in a statement that the polling results are evidence that her public safety strategy is working, calling it her “number one priority.”
She also vowed to continue her administration’s efforts in Kensington, the epicenter of the city’s opioid crisis. The Parker administration has deployed a multipronged approach, including increased police patrols in the neighborhood and an expansion of offerings for people in addiction.
But 53% of poll respondents said they do not believe the mayor’s efforts there are working, and those who live closest to the problem were the least supportive. In the region that encompasses the Lower Northeast and the river wards, where Kensington is located, 68% of people said Parker’s strategy is not working while only 18% said it is.
The mayor’s overall favorability was also lowest in that area of the city, the only region where more respondents said they had an unfavorable view of the mayor than a favorable one.
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Parker acknowledged that there is “much more work to do” in Kensington and said that “changing culture and going to war with the status quo is never easy.“
Parker’s ‘clean and green’ message is landing
For a city derisively called “Filthadelphia” and where cleanliness has been a longtime concern, a significant number of people seem to think Philadelphia is getting cleaner.
When asked about trash and litter, 41% of poll respondents said they believe the city has gotten cleaner over the last two years. Just 19% said Philadelphia has gotten dirtier, and 38% said it has stayed the same.
A sanitation department truck is seen along Cresson Street at West Earlham Street in Philadelphia on the first day of trash collection after a strike on July 14, 2025.Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer
Those are positive marks for a mayor whose slogan is “safer, cleaner, greener” and who has instituted new programs including twice-weekly trash pickup in the densest parts of the city.
Despite those efforts, Philadelphians gave worse reviews to the overall quality of city services in their neighborhood. About six in 10 respondents said the quality was either “fair” or “poor,” while 40% said “good” or “excellent.”
Staff writer Michelle Baruchman contributed to this article.
A non-alcoholic Philly spirits brand is finding early success by doing everything — from blending to bottling — by hand.
Cult of Trees is a new line of alcohol-free aperitifs produced at Maken Studios in Kensington. Inside the sunny production space, founder Meredith Sheehy spends hours each week distilling homemade herb blends into a line of zero-proof cocktails that taste like fizzy spritzes.
The brand’s three flavors include Hare Brain, which is akin to a cola-spiked negroni; Meadow Core, a citrusy and floral blend of red fruits; and Billy Goat, which tastes like rolling in a field of wildflowers thanks to a mixture of herbs, honey, and elderflower. Since sales began in January, Cult of Trees has been selling well at local grocery stores and bars, such as Solar Myth and Enswell, where the drinks are served straight or floated with sparkling water or cold brew.
For Sheehy, who moved to Philly in 2022, the city is as much an inspiration for the brand as the ingredients themselves. After closing her Brooklyn-based Mezcal bar La Loba Cantina due to the pandemic, Sheehy began bartending at Philadelphia Distilling. Philly, she said, had a refreshing scene.
“People will answer questions and pour tastes of curiosities on their back bars, with genuine excitement to share,” said Sheehy. “It’s a beautifully welcoming culture here.”
From left: Hare Brain, Billy Club, and Meadow Core, Cult of Trees’s three flavors of non-alcoholic aperitifs. Bottles are sold at Riverwards Produce in Old City and Herman’s Coffee in Pennsport.Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer
Fascinated by distilling alcohol, yet increasingly conscious of her own dwindling consumption, Sheehy was inspired by the growing sober curious movement to start her own non-alcoholic cocktail brand.
Sheehy wanted to create something that wasn’t just about emulating the experience of drinking alcohol. Abstaining “shouldn’t mean that you need to take away flavor or an interesting story,” she said.
At Cult of Trees, each aperitif is made with ingredients sourced from Pennsylvania farms and requires a multiday routine of distillation, carbonation, and bottling. It’s an analog process that contrasts with that of large scale brands, which Sheehy said often rely on commercial flavor extracts — as opposed to dried botanicals or herbs — to quicken production and lower costs.
Meredith Sheehy, owner of Cult of Trees, sprinkles caraway seed into a mortar and pestle to make one of the herb blends for her line of zero-proof spirits. Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer
Getting started, then getting set back
While at Philadelphia Distilling, Sheehy became close with Jack Falkenbach, the expert distiller and legendary Philly bartender that died last year at 44. Falkenbach, she said, was always “willing to explain specialized process details at the distillery. We both liked deep-diving on things like acid phosphate,” she said. “I deeply trusted his style of drink making and technical know-how.”
Falkenbach was among Cult of Tree’s earliest supporters, Sheehy said, and one of the first people she involved in building the company. Around this time last year, the pair was making test batches together; Falkenbach was focused on nailing the carbonation as Sheehy refined the packaging.
Then the first real workday arrived. Falkenbach did not.
Meredith Sheehy, owner of Cult of Trees, poses for a photo while preparing one of the herb bases for her line of zero-proof spirts, which is based at Maken Studios in Kensington.Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer
His passing, Sheehy said, was doubly “heartbreaking,” but launching Cult of Trees left little time to grieve. “I did what all business owners have to do,” she said. “You recover and pivot, or you don’t and you lose the idea.”
Sheehy went on to launch the business with a single employee: Gordon Grubb, a veteran brewer who had been put out of work by Iron Hill’s sudden closures. Together, they make each batch of aperitifs.
Hand-bottled and hand-carbonated
Zero-proof spirits still require distillation to get the right flavors and mouthfeel, which is why many come with a higher price tag.
Each batch of aperitifs takes at least three days to produce, Sheehy said, and begins with her macerating and boiling the original herb blends that serve as the base for each beverage. Distillation is the longest part of the make process and can take upwards of several hours. After, Sheehy andGrubb carbonate and bottle each beverage by hand.
Hare Brain from Cult of Trees, a zero-proof aperitif that tastes like cola.Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer
A single batch yields only 18 to 20 cases, according to Sheehy. “It’s labor intensive right now,” she said, “but will start to get more turnkey as we grow and are able to incorporate more equipment.”
“It’s a popular suggestion from our entire team when guests are looking for a unique and local NA option,” said Enswell manager Chelsea Boyer, who often pairs Hare Brain with Rival Bro’s Whistle & Cuss espresso. “The bitter nature and gentle carbonation of the Hare Brain pairs perfectly with the candied nuttiness of the espresso.”
Meredith Sheehy, owner of Cult of Trees, caps a bottle of Hare Brain at her Kensington production facility. Each bottle of the non-alcoholic spirit is packaged by hand.Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer
The drinks have been selling well at Riverwards’ Old City location, said CEO Dan Morgan, buoyed by an April pop-up where Sheehy poured samples for guests. “I think their great flavors and beautiful packaging will really help them stand out,” Morgan said.
Cult of Trees production manager Gordon Grubb fills bottles of Hare Brain during the carbonation process at the brand’s Kensington studio.Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer
Sheehy is betting on the same. “In my opinion, consumers increasingly want transparency, local sourcing, and a story behind what they drink,” she said. “That’s what we’re trying to do.”
At a grand-reopening celebration at Stateside Live!, Stateside Vodka president Matt Quigley’s wife, Megan, grabbed his arm and beckoned to the crowd around them in disbelief.
“It was just such a prideful moment of like … we’re here to stay,” Quigley said.
Just a couple years earlier, fellow cofounder and CEO Clement “Clem” Pappas looked around Citizens Bank Park to see as many Surfsides as Miller Lites in the hands of Phillies fans: “Holy s —, this is happening,” Pappas recalled thinking at the time.
At their massive new Center City headquarters last week, Pappas and Quigley said Surfside’s astronomical rise still feels surreal.
In 2015, the area natives founded Stateside Vodka in a distillery near Kensington with their brothers, Zach Pappas and Bryan Quigley. The company started selling canned vodka sodas in 2021. But they launched into a different stratosphere when they debuted their spiked teas and lemonades in 2022.
Stateside Vodka’s taproom near Kensington is pictured in 2017, when it was called Federal Distilling. TOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer
Branded as lower-calorie, better-for-you booze, the Surfside cans took off. The cofounders said they sold 200,000 cases in the first year, then 1.3 million in 2023, nearly 5 million in 2024, and a whopping 11.1 million cases last year.
The “slammable” 4.5% ABV cans, as Matt Quigley describes them, are particularly popular in the summertime, a three-month period that accounts for about half the beverage company’s retail sales.
So far this year, Stateside is on track for 70% growth in overall sales, and a 65% growth in Surfside sales, according to the company. That comes after a record year in which the company recorded 111% overall sales growth.
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As a private company, Stateside does not have to publicly disclose earnings, and executives declined to share specific sales figures.
While Surfside has accounted for about 90% of sales in the past year, the top executives are bullish on their latest invention, a sports-drink-inspired canned cocktail called Super Lyte. They said the new beverage had sold nearly 400,000 cases in three months, meaning it could outpace Surfside’s early growth.
“The initial response is way beyond our expectation,” Clem Pappas said. “It feels like another hit.”
The company has achieved this success without the backing of an alcohol giant like Anheuser-Busch InBev or Molson Coors, which together manufactures hundreds of brands.
Quigley, 42, and Pappas, 52, said they’ve been approached by nearly every big beverage company, but they have no interest in selling anytime soon.
“As long as you’re still having fun, I see no reason to hang up the metaphorical cleats,” Quigley said.
“I don’t want to sit on the bench. I want to be in the game,” Pappas said. “We still think it’s early days.”
Stateside keeps Philly at its heart amid national growth
A wall at Stateside Vodka’s new Center City headquarters shows a handful of Surfside’s 170 partnerships.Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer
In Stateside’s earliest days, Quigley recalled confiding in Pappas about a pipe dream: “If we ever get super successful, I want a sick office in a high-rise in Center City.”
More than a decade later, they have moved from a temporary office in Feasterville-Trevose, Bucks County, to a chic new headquarters at 11th and Ludlow Streets in Market East.
The company plans to stay put for at least 10 years, the cofounders said. For now, about 80 employees work there four days a week with room to grow.
On a recent day, the office was humming during a new-hire orientation. While everyday operations include the same mundane tasks required of any business, the top bosses pride themselves on keeping the vibes light. “We’re not selling, like, car insurance,” Quigley said.
The bright industrial-style space occupies 34,200 square feet across two floors. It is centered around a long bar with a backlit Stateside marquee, a replica of the one at the tasting room. Nearby, there’s an open lounge with couches, underneath a miniature Jumbotron. Ads for Surfside, Super Lyte, and Stateside rotate on the screens.
Office happy hours are a given.
“That’s part of the special sauce,” Pappas said. “We’re in the drinks business.”
Philadelphia has always been at the heart of the company. It’s where they landed their first partnership with the Phillies, which fueled Surfside’s rise. At Citizens Bank Park, the cans have been the top-selling spirit since 2023, according to Stateside executives, citing figures from concessions provider Aramark.
Across the city, the cofounders still run the 7,500-square-foot Kensington-area tasting room and distillery, the latter of which they hope to turn into an event venue.
The distillery has been outgrowing its space for a while. But the need intensified in the past year as the vodka’s retail sales increased 120%.
They attribute the boost in part to greater name recognition thanks to Stateside Live! They said they hope to move vodka production to a larger facility somewhere in the Northeast.
Sales of the original Stateside Vodka, displayed at the company’s office bar, have grown 120% year over year.Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer
The cofounders have also stayed local: Quigley, a Fort Washington native, lives in Kensington, and Pappas, originally of Vineland, is in Haddonfield.
Stateside’s reach, meanwhile, has expanded far beyond the region. The company employs about 340 nationwide, up from around 30 in 2022, executives said, and they sell in all 50 states through a network of more than 200 distributors.
Across the country, Surfside has racked up 170 partnerships, including with MLB teams, music festivals, and colleges. Super Lyte has already acquired more than a dozen partnerships, too, including at Penn State, where they said it will be sold at Beaver Stadium this fall.
A hawker carries drinks, including Surfsides, around the concourse at Citizens Bank Park in 2024. The brand now has 170 partnerships at venues nationwide.Elizabeth Robertson / Staff Photographer
In many ways, the cofounders said, they’re trying to replicate the strategy that proved successful with Surfside at Citizens Bank Park: Connect with consumers somewhere where it feels only natural to grab a refreshing, familiar-tasting beverage.
“You’re at a hot baseball game,” Pappas said. “You got a hot dog. You got a soft pretzel. You got an iced tea” — or, rather, a Surfside.
Compared to seeing a new canned cocktail at a beer distributor, he added, “It’s more of an authentic, emotional connection.”
A beverage hawker sells Surfside cans during a Phillies game at Citizens Bank Park in 2024. Surfside has been the stadium’s top-selling spirit since 2023.Elizabeth Robertson / Staff Photographer
Surfside succeeds with familiar tastes
When customers first sip a Surfside or Super Lyte, the taste is likely familiar, perhaps even comforting. It’s similar to iced tea, lemonade, tea cooler, or Gatorade, drinks that for many have been staples since childhood.
That’s intentional, Pappas and Quigley said, and is one of the reasons they think their products have become so popular.
“If you remember your first beer, it was like, ‘Oh God, who wants that?’ It’s bitter. It’s foreign,” Pappas said. “It’s an acquired taste.”
But when it comes to these canned cocktails, “these are not acquired tastes,” he added. “They’re light. They’re easy.”
Quigley said he got the idea for Super Lyte after years of mixing vodka into Gatorade and throwing the bottles into beach bags on summer vacations. He recalled thinking: “I can’t be the only person in America that’s been doing that for a long time.”
The initial uptake of Super Lyte confirmed that, he said.
Super Lyte launched in March with four flavors: fruit punch, orange, lemon-lime, and blue chill.
Surfside now has 16 variations of iced tea, lemonade, iced tea-lemonade, and green tea. A 12-ounce Surfside contains 100 calories, 2 grams of sugar, and no carbonation, while a 12-oz Super Lyte contains 90 calories, no sugar, and no carbonation.
Stateside Vodka’s new product line, Super Lyte, is displayed at the company’s new Center City headquarters.Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer
In the alcohol industry, “we’re meeting what was previously an unmet demand,” he said. It’s “all the convenience and the alcohol level of [a light] beer, where you can drink a few of them and you’re not getting sloshed.”
Even younger consumers — who are least likely to drink alcohol, according to recent surveys — are gravitating toward Stateside products, with high sales in some college towns.
Pappas and Quigley said they don’t see drinking rates declining much farther. Instead, they predict an evolution in the market, with an even greater focus on ready-to-drink cocktails.
Matt Quigley (left), Stateside’s president and cofounder, talks about the company’s products with fellow cofounder and CEO Clement Pappas.Alejandro A. Alvarez / Staff Photographer
So Stateside’s leaders plan to keep crafting new products, they said, which is one of the reasons they have turned down acquisition offers.
“Big, publicly traded multinational companies just aren’t great at innovating,” Pappas said.
Stateside has now established “enough of the back-end capabilities to really compete pretty effectively,” he said, without losing “that entrepreneurial spirit” and the drive “to innovate and disrupt.”
At the moment, he said, they are working on several beverage ideas, none of which are ready for publication.
But it seems unlikely they’ll dabble in nonalcoholic drinks. As Quigley noted, “then it would just be iced tea.”
Philadelphia can now add two more food awards to its shelf.
Restaurants and chefs from the City of Brotherly Love took home wins in two categories Monday night in Chicago at the 2026 James Beard Awards, considered to be the most prestigious restaurant industry honor in the United States.
The showing builds on the momentum of last year, when Mawn’s Phila Lorn took home the title of Emerging Chef, an award he dedicated at the time to “the assumption” that the Cambodian noodle house in Bella Vista wasn’t “popular enough,” “focused enough,” or ”good enough” to win.
Now the assumption isn’t that Philly is an underdog. It’s that we’re a full-on culinary powerhouse.
Suntaranon originally opened the restaurant — known for its ornate dumplings — in 2019 in what is currently Mawn’s location, where it was nominated in 2020 for Best New Restaurant. In 2022, Kalaya moved to a bigger space just off Frankford Avenue in Kensington, where it has flourished, earning a Michelin Guide recommendation, a spot on The Inquirer’s The 76, and, in 2023, Suntaranon’s first Beard Award for best chef, Mid-Atlantic.
Chef Chutatip “Nok” Suntaranon as seen through the line at her restaurant Kalaya in Fishtown on August 22, 2024.Neal Santos
“This award means a lot to me because it’s validation for Thai food and validation for the city of Philadelphia that we’re a world-class food city,” Suntaranon, in a shimmering floor-length orange gown, said backstage.
Chef Jesse Ito of Royal Sushi & Izakaya on Monday night took home his first James Beard Award, for best chef, Mid-Atlantic. “It’s been a long ride,” Ito said from the stage at the Lyric Opera theater.
Indeed it has.
The chef behind the notoriously-hard-to-get-into Queen Village omakase counter and its more casual bar and restaurant has been nominated nine times for the award, which honors the top culinary talent across Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and Washington. This go-around, Ito beat outtwo-time finalist Amanda Shulman — whose Her Place Supper Club earned one of Philly’s first Michelin stars last year — and Omar TateandCybille St.Aude-Tate of Honeysuckle, who transformed their cafe-market into a Michelin-recommended prix fixe restaurant in 2025.
During his acceptance speech, Ito invoked the oft-quoted Serenity Prayer and thanked his parents, who ran theCinnaminson and Haddonfield sushi restaurant Fuji for 40 years, before selling. It’s where Ito worked his first restaurant job as a dishwasher, and a place he has long credited for helping him find his footing in the restaurant industry.
Chef Jesse Ito prepares a course during the omakase at Royal Sushi and Izakaya on Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025, in Philadelphia.Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer
“We went through so much,” Ito said, choking up. “Restaurants are glamorous, and it seems great, but we went through so much hardship. I’ll never forget the struggle just to get here.”
Royal Sushi’s success has also, at times, been its greatest challenge: The $355, 16-seat omakase prepared by Ito is one of the toughest seats to score in Philly, which potentially led to the restaurant losing out on a Michelin star last year. At the same time, the restaurant earned a spot on North America’s 50 Best Restaurants list in 2025 and high praise from The Inquirer, landing on The 76 two years in a row.
The pendulum swing of accolades keeps Ito on his toes. He told The Inquirer over the phone Monday night that he wasn’t certain what made this year different from all the others.
“I don’t know how it all works,” Ito said. “I came to Chicago 99% certain that I was going to lose.”
Now that he’s won, Ito plans to celebrate by singing Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times” and “Creep” by Radiohead at karaoke — somber choices for a victorious night.
“They’re just my songs,” said Ito. “I have to sing them.”
Who else represented Philly?
Philly restaurants and chefs didn’t take home medals in every category.
From left: The gaeng pae, khao mun klone, and moo yaang prik at Kalaya on Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2025, in Philadelphia.Monica Herndon / Staff Photographer
First-time nominee Justine MacNeil did not take home the award for outstanding pastry chef or baker, which went to Susan Bay of Washington’s buzzy Vietnamese restaurant Moon Rabbit. At Fiore — the East Kensington cafe MacNeil co-owns with husband Ed Crochet — the former fine dining pastry chef churns out thousands of classic Italian pastries a week, from oversize maritozzi to pistachio cornetti that have earned praise from 2017 James Beard Award-winner Greg Vernick and Inquirer critic Craig LaBan, among others.
Friday Saturday Sunday lost out on its second Beard Award on Monday, this time for outstanding bar. Itsdownstairs, first-come-first-served Lovers Bar was nominated for the honor, which instead went to Portland, Ore., whisky bar Scotch Lounge, a recent addition to the list of North America’s 50 Best Bars from World’s 50 Best. Friday Saturday Sunday won its first Beard award in 2023 for outstanding restaurant, and earned one of Philly’s first Michelin stars in 2025.
The deluxe nigiri box for take-out at Royal Izakaya, in a photograph from 2020.Courtesy Royal Izakaya / Jesse Ito
The Inquirer also took home hardware of its own Sunday night during the James Beard Media Awards, also in Chicago. Inquirer staff photographer Monica Herndon won for narrative photography for “The hunt for life-giving ‘country food’ in the Canadian Arctic.” The photo essay chronicled the food traditions of the Inukjuak, a remote Inuit community in northern Québec. It accompanied reporting from Inquirer food critic Craig LaBan about how the community continues to hunt and preserve foods such as caribou and beluga despite the challenges of climate change.
Philadelphia had 13 semifinalists across eight categories when the Beard Awards were announced in January. They included chef Greg Vernick for outstanding restaurateur; Amá’s Frankie Ramirez for emerging chef; Almanac in Old City for best new bar; and deli magnate Russ Cowan and Michelin Green Star winner Ian Graye of the vegan restaurant Pietramala, both for best chef, Mid-Atlantic.
All three were later eliminated from the finalists’ list.
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS – JUNE 13: Monica Herndon, winner of the Narrative Photography Award, speaks onstage during the 2026 James Beard Media Awards at the Art Institute of Chicago on June 13, 2026, in Chicago.Jeff Schear / Getty Images for the James Beard Foundation
The night’s showing adds one more win from February when Center City stalwart Oyster House was named an American classic, which honors local restaurants across the U.S. with “timeless appeal that serve quality food and are beloved by their communities.” Representatives from the Philly mainstay were in Chicago to receive their medals in person.
“I am very fortunate that I live in Philly. People are loving and caring [here]. People are strong, and we all come together to support one another,” Suntaranon said. “Go Birds!”
But a jury acquitted him of those crimes, and he walked free in May 2023.
Three years later, Bowie, now 22, is back in jail — again accused of killing two people.
Police said Bowie and several others drove to 60th and Delancey Streets on the night of March 30, and opened fire on a group of people standing outside a corner bar, wounding three and killing Paul “PJ” Cobb and Naasir Boyd, both 24.
More than a dozen shots were fired from three different 9mm handguns, police said. In the hours after the shooting, police found the Mercedes on fire on the 1200 block of Cumberland Street.
Another man, Marquis Andrews, is also expected to be charged, police said. Andrews, 22, has been in custody since April after he was charged with illegally carrying a loaded gun, court records show.
Paul “PJ” Cobb, 24, was shot and killed near 60th and Delancey Streets on March 30. Cobb was the eldest son in his large, blended family, and was born and raised in West Philly.Courtesy of the Cobb family
The deaths of Cobb and Boyd, childhood friends born and raised in the neighborhood, came amid what law enforcement officials described as an escalating feud between the crews “Northside” and “Southside” in West Philadelphia — groups that have warred across the Market Street corridor for more than a decade.
Cobb’s and Boyd’s killings not only devastated their families, but police said the shooting likely led to another. The week after they were killed, police said, four Southside affiliates seeking revenge opened fire on a Northside rival standing outside a corner store at 60th and Market Streets.
Instead, the bullets struck and killed 20-year-old Imani Ringgold, who was walking with a slice of pizza and talking to her grandmother on the phone — and who had nothing to do with the feud.
Photos of Imani Ringgold are laid out on the table at her grandmother’s home. Jessica Griffin / Staff Photographer
One detective, at a recent court hearing, testified that at least 30 people have been killed in connection with the groups’ conflicts since 2015 — a beef that has festered for so long that many people at the center don’t even know how it started.
Bowie’s cases
Prosecutors previously said the first two killings Bowie was charged with — and later acquitted of — were also tied to the Northside-Southside feud.
In that case, lifelong friends Jarell Jackson and Shahjahan McCaskill, both 26, were driving near 57th Street and Locust Avenue when three gunmen jumped out of a black SUV and fired more than two dozen bullets into their car, killing them, in October 2020.
Jarrell Jackson, left, and Shahjahan McCaskill were killed in a case of mistaken identity in West Philadelphia in October 2020.Family photos
Investigators at the time said they believed the gunmen were Northside members who shot up the car in a botched retaliation for an earlier homicide.
Chesley Lightsey, then-homicide chief at the district attorney’s office, said Jackson, a Jefferson Health technician who mentored troubled teens, and McCaskill, who was a cancer survivor and small-business owner, had nothing to do with that conflict. The men, she said, “were targeted because of the neighborhood they live in.”
Bowie was among three teens charged. But at the May 2023 trial, jurors acquitted him and his co-defendants. (Bowie was convicted of illegal gun possession in the case, and sentenced to 11½ to 23 months in jail, allowing his immediate parole, court records show.)
Marisa Palmer, a spokesperson for the district attorney’s office, said in an emailed statement that at Bowie’s trial, prosecutors presented witness testimony, and social media, video, and firearm-related evidence that prosecutors “believed established the defendants’ guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The office respects the jury’s decision, she said. She called the new allegations against Bowie “deeply concerning,” and declined to comment further.
Bowie was taken into custody last week and charged with two counts of murder, as well as three counts of attempted murder, arson, and related crimes.
Police and homicide detectives investigate a double homicide at 60th and Delancey Streets on March 30. Jessica Griffin / Staff Photographer
Investigators tied Bowie to the crime after his cell phone location data placed him near the scene of the shooting, according to the affidavit of probable cause for his arrest. Andrews’ cell data also links him to the crime, the affidavit says, and call detail records and text messages show the two men were in communication in the hours after the killings.
The records say that police also recovered the murder weapon linked to Bowie. During an April 30 car stop in Kensington, the records say, police encountered Bowie and another man, and officers recovered a 9mm handgun that a ballistics test showed was used in the killings of Boyd and Cobb.
Court records did not list an attorney for Bowie.
Families in mourning
Boyd and Cobb have deep ties to the neighborhood, and were killed just blocks from where they lived.
Cobb’s mother said in an interview that her son was raised in a house at 60th and Delancey, and that she had countless memories of him playing and riding bikes on the block where he was killed. He was the eldest son of a large, blended family.
Cobb’s mother and sisters, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said he was goofy and protective, loyal and independent. He attended Sayre High School, before earning his GED, they said, and worked in construction with his father.
Paul “PJ” Cobb, 24, loved helping take care of a collection of nieces and nephews. Courtesy of the Cobb family
But his favorite role, they said, was being an uncle to his many nieces and nephews. He picked several of them up from school and daycare each day, and cared for them as if they were his own until his sisters finished work.
The sisters said they now tell their kids their favorite “Uncle P” is “in the sky.”
One older sister said that on a recent flight, her 3-year-old kept staring out the airplane window, looking for him in the clouds.
“She asked ‘Mom, where’s Uncle P at?’” she said. “And I had to tell her, ‘He’s further in the sky than we are on the plane.’”
His death, they said, has fractured their lives and ability to feel safe in their neighborhood.
Cobb’s mother said the conflicts of Northside and Southside have always loomed. Her son was not affiliated with Southside, she said, but having grown up on blocks at the center of the group’s feuds, he was cautious about his whereabouts, and she often worried about him.
When she first heard police made an arrest, she said, she was relieved. But learning that Bowie had been charged and acquitted before left her uneasy.
“There are things that happened,” she said, “that could have prevented this.”
Tuan Van Bui’s bad luck arguably started the day he was born in 1970 in the city then known as Saigon — the child of a Vietnamese woman and one of the thousands of U.S. soldiers who fought in Southeast Asia for nearly two decades.
Van Bui never knew his dad, but he quickly learned what it was like to grow up in a hostile homeland that called the estimated 25,000 to 50,000 Amerasian kids like him “children of the dust.” The communist government that won the war in 1975 denied him any education past grade school.
In 1990, Van Bui caught a break — of sorts. In the late 1980s, a U.S. Congress struggling to come to grips with the mess America had left behind passed the Amerasian Homecoming Act. That allowed Van Bui to legally immigrate to America and settle in Philadelphia’s Kensington neighborhood, but with no real safety net.
His first two decades on U.S. soil were rough, marked by occasional run-ins with the law. But in middle age, Van Bui had settled into a more comfortable American life. He married a fellow Amerasian immigrant in 2017, earned some money from construction and other odd jobs, and indulged his quirky hobbies like stamp collecting. He was paying back his fines from the bad years and — although threatened with a removal order — he religiously showed up for check-ins with U.S. immigration officials.
His family says Van Bui was doing everything the right way.
Still, it was with much trepidation that Van Bui showed up with his wife at the Philadelphia immigration office on Aug. 18, as the reelected Donald Trump and his team pushed for a massive increase in arrests and deportations. What happened next, as his wife related to family members, was even worse than they had feared.
Tuan Van Bui in an undated family photo. Van Bui, 55, died in immigration custody at the Miami Correctional Facility in Bunker Hill, Ind., on April 1.Handout art
Van Bui’s stepdaughter, Ly Wang, told me this week that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were waiting. “Before he could even really check in, they saw him, they spotted him,” she said. “The ICE agents ambushed him, and they shoved my mom out of the way. They tackled my stepdad … shoving him into a wall because he’s a big dude.” Wang said the ICE agents threw Van Bui’s paperwork in the trash and warned her mom, “You need to leave before we make it a problem for you, too.”
Van Bui’s arrest that August day was the start of a seven and a half month Kafkaesque journey through the rancid food and 4 a.m. wake-ups of ICE detention sites, first in upstate Pennsylvania, and then nearly 700 miles away in rural Indiana.
It ended on April 1. That morning, Van Bui had made his usual phone call to his wife and, despite the routine complaints, sounded fine. The next call came that night, but from the chaplain at Indiana’s Miami Correctional Facility. Van Bui had suddenly collapsed and died. He was just 55.
It took more than two months for Wang and her mom — who herself had suffered a debilitating stroke in the days right after watching Van Bui’s violent arrest — to deal with Indiana authorities, obtain some additional testing, bring his body back home, and secure a spot for him in the Fernwood Cemetery in suburban Lansdowne, where he was buried on June 5.
But his family’s many questions have not been laid to rest.
Why was Van Bui’s ICE detention dragged out for so many months when — given the wretchedness of life behind barbed wire — he and his family would have preferred deportation to Vietnam, even if he hadn’t been there for 36 years? Why wasn’t Van Bui given more medical attention, as doctors noted his swollen knees and other signs of worsening health?And why is ICE’s account of Van Bui’s death so different from what other detainees told the family — that staff did nothing at first while they, the detainees, attempted CPR until paramedics finally arrived a full hour after the collapse, too late to do anything but declare him dead?
A 55-yr-old Vietnamese immigrant, Tuan Van Bui, died at the Miami Correctional Center in Indiana in government custody last week, marking the 46th detainee death during the #Trump administration's #immigration crackdown. https://t.co/vHgj8qtncz
And a bigger question hangs over all of this: Why did a redemption-seeking United States government invite Van Bui to come here from the other side of the world, only to leave him to fend for himself before brutally arresting him, dumping him in a hellhole prison, and allegedly watching him die from chronic and then acute neglect?
“I think he fully considered America to be his home, and he was very comfortable here despite even all the challenges against [Amerasians],” Wang said. What happened to Tuan Van Bui is in many ways mystifying, but he is also not unique.
Even as the Trump regime’s deportation raids have sometimes dominated the headlines, much of the attention has focused on the targeting by masked ICE and Border Patrol agents of brown and Black neighborhoods, such as Latinos in Los Angeles and Chicago or the Somali community in Minneapolis. The government’s stepped-up arrests of Asian Americans have largely flown under the radar.
“There’s just a severe sense of fear in the community,” Nancy Nguyen, the executive director of Philadelphia-based VietLead, told me, adding that the message “for the Asian communities is that they are not wanted here under Trump.”
A painful irony is that the hardest hit have been refugees for whom the United States opened its doors in the latter years of the 20th century — a belated acknowledgment that their plight was often the result of America’s violent and unpopular war in Southeast Asia. This winter in Minnesota, masked immigration raiders frequently targeted the Hmong people from Laos who’d once been welcomed for their role in helping American troops and the CIA over there.
Nguyen said that nationally, more than 1,000 Vietnamese immigrants and more than 500 Laotians were deported in 2025 — compared with fewer than 100 a year before the second coming of Trump. A few have been sent to remote African nations like Eswatini, where they don’t know any people or the language. Many more have been languishing, as Van Bui did, in the cruel limbo of ICE detention — sometimes with lethal consequences. Nguyen said that of the 50 or so ICE detainees who’ve died under the Trump regime, nearly a third were of Asian descent.
No one deserves to die in ICE custody. Every person in detention centers deserves basic human needs like water and safe shelter. My visit to Miami Correctional Facility raised concerns that should not be ignored. pic.twitter.com/JznLZKhpff
Van Bui was actually the second Asian American to die at the Miami Correctional Facility — run by the state of Indiana, which contracts with ICE — since February. Lorth Sim, 59, who came to America in 1983 as a refugee from the brutal dictatorship of Cambodia’s Pol Pot, also collapsed at the facility, where officials also blamed heart disease.
What’s more, Van Bui is the third member of Pennsylvania’s Asian community to die in immigration custody in less than a year. In January, 46-year-old Cambodian American Parady La was arrested outside his Upper Darby home and died three days later at Philadelphia’s federal detention center, reportedly while undergoing narcotics withdrawal. Last August, 32-year-old Chinese immigrant Chaofeng Ge died at the upstate Moshannon Valley Processing Center five days after his arrest near Harrisburg; family members and advocates have challenged ICE’s assertion that his death was a suicide by hanging.
In Van Bui’s case, ICE issued a fairly detailed statement that insisted the Amerasian detainee — who’d suffered a serious stroke on Christmas Eve 2023 and used a cane for mobility, among other preexisting health problems — was properly monitored and treated amid clear signs his condition was deteriorating, with a decreased platelet count and then swollen knees indicating “obstructive pulmonary disease.” It also claimed — disputed in the accounts other detainees have offered Van Bui’s family — that staff at the Indiana facility responded quickly to his April 1 collapse with CPR and a defibrillator before he was pronounced dead at 6 p.m.
Whether ICE and Indiana corrections officers offered Van Bui adequate medical care is still up for debate, but what the government definitely did not offer was empathy. As with other ICE custody deaths, grieving relatives were slammed with an official press release that denied Van Bui’s humanity.
“Criminal illegal alien from Vietnam passes away at Miami Correctional Center” was the headline on ICE’s press release, which stressed Van Bui’s encounters with law enforcement when he was a younger man.
His stepdaughter Wang told me the litany of criminal charges in the release includes some arrests for which he was not charged or convicted, and that he was diligently repaying fines for other past violations. But what hurts more is the regime’s cruel characterization of a human being whom Wang described as a soft-spoken, gentle giant who never turned down a request for help from his Kensington neighbors and — “a nerd in a way” — loved to scour flea markets for cuckoo clocks or rare coins or stamps.
Chaofeng Ge, 32, died in August at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center while detained by ICE.Courtesy of David Rankin
She said he’d told her little about the first 20 years of his life in Saigon (renamed Ho Chi Minh City after the war), but did admit that the abandonment of his American GI father weighed on him.
“Something that he did tell me and just confided in me was that he never felt like he grew up feeling wanted, you know? Starting with his dad not being around, and his mother being very busy and being a single parent,” she said. “So he had kind of a rough start.”
Amerasian kids were treated cruelly in Vietnam — as reminders of the hated Americans who’d invaded their country — and typically denied any education beyond grade school, which apparently was the case for Van Bui. The United States seemed to acknowledge that harsh reality when Congress and the Reagan administration enacted the special AM-1 visa that allowed Van Bui to come here in 1990. But the new arrivals didn’t always adapt easily to a home where they were reminders of a war that most Americans wanted to forget as much as the Vietnamese.
“My impression that he got into kind of the wrong mix of crowds,” said Wang, who first met her future stepfather when she was a teenager. “I see him as someone who, because he didn’t have that much of an education … that you could manipulate, unfortunately.”
Like many others, Van Bui faced an immigration judge’s removal order from the 2000s because of his legal problems, yet was allowed to remain as long as he continued his regular check-ins — which he did until his violent arrest last August.
Van Bui was initially sent to the large Moshannon Valley site in Clearfield County, Pa., then transferred in December hundreds of miles west to the lockup in tiny Bunker Hill, Ind., where, since last year, ICE has promised the state of Indiana $291 a day — four times the normal rate — to house some of its rising numbers of detainees.
In just a short period of time, complaints from detainees, advocates, and Indiana Democratic Rep. André Carson — who visited the site just days after Van Bui died — that conditions at Miami Correctional Facility are cruel and inhumane have mounted. Carson said two detainees he met described “heartbreaking” conditions, and that a lack of functioning intercoms may have played a role in Van Bui’s death. The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana settled multiple suits from state inmates — predating the 2025 deal with ICE — alleging pitch-black conditions from windows covered with steel plates, and frequent episodes of cells flooded with wastewater.
Two deaths this year at Miami Correctional Facility's ICE detention space is getting attention.https://t.co/1pzcfwUQo9
Wang said it took weeks to even learn Van Bui had been moved to Indiana, and when they did reconnect, he complained of freezing-cold winter conditions and horrible food, even as they were awakened by guards for breakfast at 4 a.m. Things were so bad that Van Bui actually wanted to be deported back to Vietnam, but despite finally seeing a judge in February, the government continued to hold him in these gulag-like conditions.
Until he died.
During the agonizing weeks Van Bui’s wife and stepdaughter worked to bring home his remains — an effort which included this still active GoFundMe page — they heard from other detainees, most of them also Asian Americans. One Vietnamese native from Philadelphia who successfully won his release in a habeas corpus case tracked down Van Bui’s wife for a surprise visit, to tell the family his version of what really happened on April 1.
“What we’ve heard from the cellmates is that he collapsed, and they immediately called for help, and no one came,” Wang recounted. “So the cellmates themselves, they did the CPR. None of the staff did CPR. The cellmates did the CPR. They … did CPR and chest compressions relentlessly, with somebody else pressed up against the gate of the jail cell just yelling, ‘Help! Help!’”
They allege there was no help, not right away.
“From their view, what they saw was the correction officer sitting there staring at the video and not moving at all,” Wang continued. “It’s reported that [the corrections officers] waited at least around 15 to 20 minutes before they got up, locked down all the cells, and then finally went over to see what happened. Once they came over, they bought a defibrillator, except they did not know how to use it, so they had to call the paramedics. By the time the paramedics showed up, they declared him dead, which was about an hour later than he actually collapsed.”
I asked a spokesperson for the Indiana Department of Correction about what really happened on April 1, but was referred to ICE. And ICE, as with past columns, has not responded to my request for more information. All we have is ICE’s official report, which insists that detention center staff were the ones who performed CPR, that the defibrillator was used — and which offers no timeline for how long it really took for the paramedics to arrive.
Those explanations aren’t satisfactory to Van Bui’s family, or to immigration advocates here in Philadelphia or the ACLU back in Indiana, who continue to press for answers while they explore possible legal action.
But there are questions that are bigger than any courtroom. Why are Asian communities that, in those post-Vietnam War years, drove the comeback of America’s cities and older suburbs now targeted by a terror campaign from the U.S. government? Why did the United States abuse innocent people from Southeast Asia — and especially the Amerasians — twice, first in a pointless war and now in a gulag archipelago on American soil?
What did Tuan Van Bui do to deserve neglect and death in a dark, dank cell hundreds of miles from the people who loved him?
When his family finally held his services at a Chinatown funeral home, it wasn’t known if his wife would be healthy enough to attend. She did show up briefly at his wake, just long enough to utter these anguished words that Ly Wang posted on their GoFundMe page.
“You said you would come home! Why didn’t you come home?”
